The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg

The greatest contribution to literature made by
Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg was also
the most perishable. For Ginsberg, verse
wasn't something to be entombed in zero
circulation magazines and academic journals,
but a magic incantation to be chanted, howled
out and spoken aloud. A born performer and
spokesperson, Ginsberg reclaimed for poetry
its rightful place as a theatrical art form. To
see him read from even his most mediocre
works was to witness a man in the grip of an
enormous and charismatic gift that was closer
in kind to Marlon Brando and Richard Burton
than to Blake or Keats or Yeats.

In the mad carnival of post-WWII America,
Ginsberg was poetry's player king--a writer of
wildly uneven quality but with a sweeping
capacity for creating and delivering broad and
self-mythologizing rhetoric in a riveting
emotive style. It was a talent perfectly suited to
the burgeoning media age, one that made
Allen Ginsberg as much an icon of his times
as Elvis, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

All of which makes filmmaker Jerry Aronson's
somewhat erratic documentary "The Life and
Times of Allen Ginsberg" a must-see movie
for anyone with an interest in modern poetry
generally or in Ginsberg specifically. Though
hardly the daring or experimental portrait
Ginsberg himself might have advocated back
in the days when he and Jack Kerouac were
creating their bizarre underground movie "Pull
My Daisy" with director Robert Frank,
Aronson's workmanlike piece--originally
released in 1993, but recut in this new edition
to reflect Ginsberg's passing in 1997--has the
great good sense to feature a wide range of
Ginsberg's poetry as "read"--acted, really--by
the author himself.

Here are long excerpts from the
acknowledged masterworks (Ginsberg's
breakthrough poem "Howl" as performed on
record in 1955 and for the camera in 1992) as
well as lesser poems like "Plutonian Ode," a
platitudinous protest epic which the film tries
to imply had a decisive influence on shutting
down Colorado's Rocky Flats Nuclear
Weapons Plant. (The facility, which
manufactured plutonium triggers for hydrogen
bombs for over 40 years, was actually shut
down by the EPA 11 years after "Plutonian
Ode" was published). As enacted for the
camera, Ginsberg's death poetry is particularly
effective. His justly famous "Kaddish," about
the suffering and early death of his deranged
mother Naomi, remains a moving cry of the
heart, but so too are the more gently lyrical
excerpts from "Don't Grow Old," the later and
less renowned poetry cycle he created in
memory of his father, the poet Louis
Ginsberg.

Given Ginsberg's hectic and very public life,
there is also a good deal of footage placing
him in contexts that are alternately heroic and
bizarre. A section on the riotous clashes
between the police and hippies during the
Chicago-based Democratic Convention of
1968 plays like unintentional comedy, with
Ginsberg chanting Buddhist
"Ommmmmmmmms" into a PA system while
cops bust heads to an underscore of Jimi
Hendrix playing "The Star Spangled Banner."
Far better is an encounter between Ginsberg
and the oily conservative TV host William F.
Buckley, with Ginsberg at his absolute peak
as an iconic shaman of the coming hippie
apocalypse, and Buckley smiling mirthlessly
and lobbing arid bon mots at this dervish of
positive vibrations that has somehow got
loose on his soundstage.

Ginsberg participated heavily in creating "The
Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg," and the film
suffers from the same problems that impact
most authorized biographies, especially in its
tendency to sand down rough edges in order
to please the widest possible audience. Still,
the Ginsberg that emerges from Aronson's
worshipful portrait is enough of an iconoclast
to make for some unexpected utterances, as
when Ginsberg blames the American Left for
the rise of Richard Nixon, and by implication
for the death of the hippie millennium
Ginsberg himself worked so hard to create.

If a tendency toward hagiography was the
price Aronson paid for his virtually unfettered
access to Ginsberg the man, it seems an
acceptable trade-off. When Ginsberg rants,
raves, shouts and coos his poems for the
camera, this "Life and Times" has all the
justification it needs.
Featuring Allen Ginsberg, William
Burroughs,
Norman Mailer and Ken Kesey. Directed and
produced by Jerry Aronson. A New Yorker
release. Documentary. Unrated. Running
time: 85 min